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This week I finished a cabinet carpentry project started after Thanksgiving in 2014. It was a stretch of my skills, the first time building a project with full panel construction, where all the panels were solid wood. Except for the bottom of the drawer, the entire structure is made of solid wood. To control cost, the choice of wood was pine and fir. The legs and rails are made from fir, bought as a 2×8 and re-milled by me with a tablesaw and a thickness planer. The top, panels, drawer sides, and the rest are made from 1×6 lumber.

I finished the wood with fourteen thousand coats of milk paint, sanding between each one. The milk paint, in cream color, was top-coated with Danish oil finish because milk paint’s rough finish can stain easily. The green glass knobs came from a collection of my grandfather’s.

The early design planned for through tenons, to leave little exposed pegs. I had also intended to carve a sun-and-moon theme, later to be painted with bright colors.

The panels were cut with the tablesaw. I mounted the panels in the tenoning jig. The runout was ridiculous. In spite of using a micrometer to true the tenoning jig, I had a very difficult time keeping the panel thickness constant. Next time I want to make panels I’ll buy a router jig for the purpose.

The drawer slides are also custom. I had roller suspended drawer slides, but neglected to design the drawer with enough clearance. The drawer front attaches to the drawer sides with hand-cut half-blind dovetails. I was pleased that my first attempt at half-blind dovetails worked out well.

The carcase is entirely mortise and tenon joints. I cut the tenons on the tablesaw wit the jig. In the entire cabinet the only metal fasteners are the clips that hold the table tops on, and the L-brackets that hold the draw slides on.

The best solution I have found for writing on the back of plastic-coated photos, like those from Costco or most modern developers, is drafting ink. It would seem the inks are usually archival even though the paper is not. The writing is actually readable. When the ink is applied correctly it can be handled without risk of smearing in as little as a few minutes.

If you can’t stand my dip pen solution, more details are available here, where I recommended the Zig Millenium (blotted) or the Zig Photo Signature. The problem with drafting inks is that they cannot be applied with a Bic pen. The inks can by applied with technical pens or with dip pens. Technical pens are a delight, you can cap them—or rather you must cap them. They dry out and clog the pen if not cleaned properly. They are difficult to clean too.

When I’m writing on photos, I tend to do a batch at once, and then none for weeks. Filling a technical pen and cleaning it for an hour’s use is unsatisfying. The alternative to technical pens is the dip pen. Not all dip pens are created equally, or at least not for the same purpose. I had purchased a set of drawing nibs at the local hobby shop thinking I was all set. However, the drawing nibs left puddles of ink on, snagged, and spattered. The photo below shows the bumps and still-wet pools of ink when using some nibs and the smooth, even writing from others.

Different nibs, obviously, perform differently. I thought perhaps different inks would too, and set about to test the pair. A well-performing ink-and-nib combination should

apply legibly without spatter

leave writing that does not smear after a few minutes

be convenient to use

Three simple criteria. Five inks. Six nibs.

Higgins Black Magic (probably latex based) (left)

Reeves & Poole India Ink (shellac based)

Rapidograph Ultradraw 3085-F (acrylic or latex based)

Rapidograph Rapidraw 3084-F (acrylic or latex based)

Rapidograph Universal 3080-F (acrylic or latex based)

Hunt No. 104 (left)

Hunt No. 102

Hunt No. 56 School

Hunt No. 513EF

Speedball B-6

Speedball B-5

The test involved writing a the ink name and the nib name on the back of a Costco print. The paper is Fujifilm Crystal Archive, which seems to be a common print medium. I wrote each set on the back of the photos. About 24 hours later I scanned the images. After scanning I pressed a wadded facial tissue to the paper and wiped firmly from left to right. Each of the photos below shows the left side, before wiping, and the right side after wiping.

Higgins did not smear, but it did bleed. The detail zoom below is taken from the B-6 test, and the edges are fuzzy and bloomed. This ink, once my favorite, must now be relegated to the scrap.

Reeves & Poole had very minor smearing with the No. 56 nib. It puddled horribly with the 513EF and the No. 56. It worked beautifully with the B-5, B-6. The No. 104 and the No. 102 both scraped the paper and left little puddles, but might be acceptable.

The Ultra 3085-F smeared with the No. 56. It was otherwise a stable ink. It performed well with the B-5 and the B-6 nib. The other nibs either puddled or scratched the photo. The detail below is the with the B-5 nib, and though the line is wide, the mark is very well behaved.

The 3084-F is darker than the 3085-F, and the ink is as well behaved in the B-5 and the B-6 nibs. I see no reason, based on these data, to prefer the 3085. I should have called it Rapid, not Ultra.

The 3080-F is dark, which is good, but the lines are very broad and poorly controlled.

This spring three lovely chicks joined our family, Betty, Penny, and Ginger. Ginger discovered her inner rooster in due time, and was rehomed—we are not zoned for the crowing half of the species. To protect the birds from freezing during our winter travels, and to let them out at the sunrise, they have been housed in the electric henhouse. At dawn and dusk the hens are released or secured by a linear actuator, locking in heat, wind and potential predators locked out.

Betty watching the installation of the electric henhouse.

The heart of the electric henhouse is a bare-chip variant of the Arduino. It connects to a realtime clock with battery backup to get the time. The time, in turn, is used with calculated sunrise and sunset so the door opens at sunrise and closes shortly after sunset when the birds have settled down for the night. The ATMega runs at 5 volts, and so a dual H-bridge is used to provide the linear actuator with the power it needs.

The overall code architecture is straightforward, every second the processor checks the time. If the time is between the sunrise and sunset, tell the motor to open, otherwise close. The motor module maintains a state so that it won’t try to open an open door. The linear actuator is cleverly designed, it won’t strain to open when it is always open and it won’t close when all the way closed.

The only code module with much complexity is the sunrise and sunset calculation, which is an approximation based on a US Naval Observatory code, with only minor modifications. I tested it by running the calculation over a series of days throughout the year and comparing with published almanac.

I purchased two separate FTDI USB-to-serial chips to program the bare ATMega chip, and was unable to get either of them working. I followed programming instructions similar to those here, and those worked every time.

The linear actuator is visible at the top. It slides the door (currently open).

Two weeks ago I acquired a 3D printer; specifically the Printrbot Simple Metal Kit and, after some warranty help, it’s printing well. The first thing I printed was the fan shroud for the 3D printer itself, as recommended by Printrbot, but the next things were for my own design. I printed a set of three sieves, to fulfill my long-time dream of quantifying the performance of coffee mills.

For those of you who read my coffee blog posts years ago, I was frustrated because nobody quantifies the grind performance. Vendors and coffee pundits are happy to talk about the merits of a conical burr grinder or fret about the cheap blade grinder you got from your lost year with Gevalia. Quantifying grinder performance should be pretty straightforward. Take a set of sieves and sort the grinds by size, the more consistent grinders will produce more grounds in a narrow range of sizes. Spoiler: I have only measured my whirling blade grinder so far, not my Capresso burr grinder or any of the commercial grinders.

The printed sieves are just cylinders with a printed mesh bottom. They don’t stack well, since I used too little taper. My finest one had holes so small that it plugged with the finest coffee dust, so there is more to do in the sieve design. Nevertheless, I started with the mesh from Thingiverse, and added 15 mm of wall height. When I get a version of these that stacks I’ll post the design to the Thingiverse too.

I arranged the sieves in a stack and shook. The sieves clogged almost immediately, so I took a small brush and worked the from the top layer down until I had good separation.

The results, in the following picture, show that almost no particles were larger than my largest mesh, less than half were larger than my medium mesh, and the rest were larger than my fine mesh.

So what are the mesh sizes? I took macro photos of the meshes and then measured them optically—you know, counted pixels. The composite photo below shows the basic idea, and below that is a zoomed-in version of the medium sieve.

The medium sieve is made from “threads”, where each “thread” is two passes with the extruder head. It should be possible to do a single extruder path, but I have not yet tuned the OpenSCAD file to get a consistent result.

Mesh

Cell Diagonal

Coffee

Percent

Coarse

2.5 mm

<0.1 g

0%

Medium

1.4 mm

1.0 g

28%

Fine

0.48 mm

2.6 g

72%

fall through

<0.1 g

0%

Whether grind consistency can actually be identified by a taster in a blind test is an open, and wonderful, question. Happy brewing!

When we bought our house we hired an electrician to install ceiling fans and lights. He worked, worked, and worked. My illusions of electrician’s work dissolved. Their work is a great deal more like laying bricks than solving equations. Oddly, the truth for electricians is also the truth for electronics.

Nearly two years after starting, more than 18~months after finishing the electronics, source code, and cardboard mock-up I finally finished my clock. I have recreated—nay, improved upon—the greatest alarm clock I have ever owned.

In some ways my clock was started about thirty years ago, when some foresighted person planted a lovely little apple tree in what is now my back yard. The lovely little apple tree was a gorgeous mature giant shady apple tree until the spring of 2012. The spring came warm and early but also trisected by two severe cold spells. The frost killed several of my trees major limbs, and may eventually kill the tree.

One of the major limbs became firewood. Then one of the firewood logs became boards, and finally one of the boards became the main faces of the clock. Making a board from firewood is, no doubt, ancient. For me it was a new experience with old techniques. I used a hand powered bow saw, affixed the firewood in the vice, and ripped boards by hand. It is a tiresome process and the boards were not machined to the parallel faces you get in dimensioned lumber. No matter, hand planes helped me get one face smooth and flat. I marked a constant thickness, flipped the board over, and planed the uneven face. The finished board was smooth, clean, and beautifully figured.

The original vision for the box of the clock had hand-cut dovetails visible on the front. However, the apple wood was unsupportive. It was brittle, and prone to fracturing on detail peices. It was also almost too small. The cherry boards I selected for the sides were not long enough to dovetail join the front and back.

The final result is lovely to me. It has a lid so the interface is not visible on the bedside, and the lid showcases the figure of the apple wood. The display is a simple red that does not keep me awake at night. The plain box design weighs enough to keep from migrating around the nightstand, and the interface is actually good.

Design and Use

I set out to imitate the functions of my beloved but deceased clock, see Behold! A number pad. I started the design with a set of use cases, Set Time, Set Alarm, Turn on Alarm, and Turn off Alarm. The notes below are from the original design before I bought the first part, with no edits but formatting.

Set Time

User opens decorative lid. User sets mode switch “set time” mode. The display is turned to current time. User enters numbers starting with most significant digit, in 24 hour time format. After entering the first number, only that digit is displayed.

If user enters a mistake, he hits “clear (#),” and the process restarts at “user enters numbers”. Clear: display is blanked. To keep the setting, user leaves the “set time” mode. On error, the time remains unchanged. Error conditions are:

User exits "set time" mode without entering a new time at all.

User exits "set time" mode without entering a valid time.

Set Alarm

Same as “Set Time,” but using “set alarm” mode.

Turn on Alarm

User turns on alarm. Display flashes time the alarm is set for about 5 seconds. Display resumes normal operation. The “alarm on” LED lights. When the time reaches the set alarm time, a beeper will sound. The beeper will sound until the alarm is shut off.

Turn off Alarm

Alarm LED is turned off. If the alarm is currently beeping, the beeping ceases.

Electronics Design

I ended up with a Sparkfun keypad, and care of Andrew’s diligent work I was able to configure the Arduino microprocessor to use the keypad almost painlessly. I arranged the pinout as follows:

Pin

Use

0

not available

1

not available

2

keypad 0

3

keypad 1

4

keypad 2

5

keypad 3

6

keypad 4

7

keypad 5

8

keypad 6

9

alarm on/off switch

10

alarm tone (PWM)

11

12

13

14 (A0)

15 (A1)

display brightness potentiometer

16 (A2)

17 (A3)

mode switch (3-state) alarm/time

18 (A4)

i2c – display and realtime clock

19 (A5)

i2c – display and realtime clock

Pin A3 was used for analog read to determine the state of a simple resistor network. Switching the mode switch changes the resistors in a voltage divider. I designed this before I learned about the Arduino’s internal pull-up resistor, so the analog electronics are more difficult than I would make them today.

I am rebuilding my Arduino-based data collection system. Named the RIMU for some long-forgotten and pointless acronym. My old one used a momentary switch—a button—to change which sensor is displayed on the LCD. It is awful because if the Arduino is busy when you push the switch then nothing happens. I’m fixing it with a 5-position switch sold for changing the pickup combinations on electric guitars.

I was thinking about some really good machine interfaces, and some really bad. I walked about the house with a camera. Below are some photo collections of good and bad interfaces around the house.

Good interfaces control devices unambiguously with touch. You should not have to look at the device to know what mode you have changed it to. Really great interfaces, like a light switch, reveal their state by touch.

My switch is almost as good as a light switch. With five states it is hard to tell which state it is in by feeling its position; however, it is easy to change state. Even better, its position is an absolute indication of its state. There is no issue of the Arduino being busy when the state changes, because the state is fixed by the switch. It is not toggled by some transient state.

I bought my switch from Sparkfun, and also lifted this product image from them.

If you can find old rotary switches with detents you can use the analog read function of the Arduino to get all the states with a single pin. In this case, though, I will use three pins to represent the states. I believe it is possible to configure this switch with a few resistors to represent all its states with a single analog input, but it is more complex to figure out and I am not short on pins. My definition of pins. The ones with wires are the only ones I need to use.

With just three digital inputs, the Arduino can read all five switch states. The Arduino’s microprocessor includes built-in pull-up resistors. These are easy to use, but a little bit confusing. A pull-up resistor means that if the pin is not attached to anything, the Arduino will read the pin high.

In the following table I show a Y to indicate how the switch is connected internally. However the ABC column shows what you would read from the pins in the Arduino.

I play Chutes and Ladders with my kids sometimes. It isn’t a game of skill. Many months ago I was involved in a game that went on and on and on. As soon as someone would get close to the end he or she would land on a chute and be shunted nearly back to start.

I was left wondering just how long a game would last. So this week my son and I implemented a simulator in Python to calculate how long any one person’s game would last. Each person’s play is independent in Chutes and Ladders, the characters do not interact. Therefore, simulating an entire game is almost as easy as simulating a single player’s experience.

First, the board is 100 cells long and the spinner gives you a value between 1 and 6, just like rolling a die. A fair die will have an average roll of 3.5, so on average it would take about 100/3.5 = 28.6 turns to finish a game if there were no chutes or ladders. The histogram of game length without chutes and ladders is below. The longest plausible game is about 35 turns in this scenario and the average is 28.6 turns, estimated from 10,000 random trials.

The addition of chutes and ladders stretches the histogram radically. Instead of the longest single-person game being about 35 turns, it is now over 200 turns. Fortunately, a 200-turn game is not very likely. Surprisingly the average is not a hundred million years. At 30.8 turns the average game with chutes and ladders is only a little longer than the average game without.